Tom Seaver Says Today’s Pitchers Are ‘Babied Too Much’. Do You Agree?

Mets great Tom Seaver has spoken out in the wake of Matt Harvey’s season ending injury. In Seaver’s rant, he left no stone unturned–even going after today’s ‘computer geeks’ who Seaver perceives to be running things.

“These kids today, they want to be men, they want to be foxhole guys, but they’re not being allowed to do that,…Imagine if these computer geeks who are running baseball now were allowed to run a war? They’d be telling our soldiers: ‘That’s enough. You’ve fired too many bullets from your rifle this week!’ ”

“There is no set numerical value you can put on a pitcher,…They’re all different. What’s important is to get into the pitcher’s head, to know what he’s made of….I guarantee most of these pitchers today would like to realize their full potential and pitch more. Unfortunately, this is what the game has come to and sadly there’s no turning back.””

Maybe the comparison to war was a bit much, but largely his point is understood.

The money aspect with pitchers getting outrageously large sums of money has made team’s all the more cautious in keep them injury free.

Seaver does kind of speak from his own elite bubble though, Seaver’s career is what most pitchers can only dream of–3 Cy Youngs and 300 plus wins, one can only hope to have that longevity without worrying about health. So, it’s easy for Seaver to say in retrospect that today’s pitchers are coddled too much.

Are teams today overly dotting on pitchers? Perhaps, but if time has proven anything it’s that teams with aces win. Hard to knock a team for doing their best to protect their investments.